HTTP/1.0 200 OK Content-Type: text/html Now Drugs Are An Election Issue
Pubdate: Mon, 21 Mar 2005
Source: Times, The (UK)
Section: Comment
Copyright: 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd
Author: Simon Jenkins
Bookmark: (Cannabis - United Kingdom)


Pre-election nerves are getting out of hand. Consider the weekend madness 
from the Home Office on drugs.

The new Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, once confessed to The Times that he 
was eager not to appear a liberal.

He has duly ordered a review of the classification of cannabis on the 
Government's list of banned drugs.

This follows "news" that marijuana, particularly the strong strain of 
mostly home-grown skunk, might be more harmful than previously thought. The 
drug was reduced from class B to class C by Mr Clarke's predecessor, David 
Blunkett, just a year ago. The effect was ostensibly to save police time 
because possession of class C drugs was not an arrestable offence. However, 
Mr Blunkett immediately negated the impact of the change by making class C 
possession arrestable. The change was almost entirely cosmetic, but had the 
effect of making the drug seem more safe - or seem so to those who had 
never tried it and might take any notice of Home Office classifications.

The 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act has long been the most harmful, 
counterproductive and politically mesmeric law on the British statute book. 
It has long borne no relation to reality.

There is hardly a young person in the land who has not tried cannabis and 
some four million people use it regularly, undeterred by the most draconian 
drug laws in Europe. These laws have left drug distribution in the hands of 
criminals and made British cities, small towns, even rural villages the 
most drug-ridden in the Western world.

The cramming of jails with users and dealers has had no deterrent effect. 
Indeed the Home Office's tolerance of drug abuse in its own institutions 
has them prime centres of hard drug addiction.

Drug illegality has corrupted the police, plagued schools private and 
public and become the single biggest cause of industrial-scale crime.

Yet successive governments have refused to reform the 1971 Act. Even the 
right-wing press is now in favour of reform, as are numerous opinion polls.

Two years ago, under pressure from reformers, Mr Blunkett decided to risk a 
modicum of liberal praise by reclassifying cannabis.

It would in future be treated as less harmful than cocaine, Ecstasy and 
various chemical substances. Mr Blunkett was moved by the fact that the 
widespread use of the drug and expert opinion that it was less harmful to 
health than, for instance, legal alcohol and nicotine.

There was already evidence that the police were going easy on those caught 
with the drug. "Uncoupling" cannabis from harder drugs made sense, even if 
the reform was almost pointlessly modest.

But the Government did not have the courage to licence cannabis for medical 
purposes, despite copious evidence of courts simply refusing to convict 
patients using the drug in that way.

There is no shortage of studies over the past decade showing that intensive 
cannabis use - at whatever strength - can induce serious hangovers and 
memory loss. For those inclined to depression or other forms of psychosis, 
including panic attacks, the effect can be severe.

This is not new, any more than skunk is new. Excessive use of alcohol, 
amphetamines and barbiturates can also be harmful to some people.

Cannabis has always been toxic, in the sense that body finds it hard to rid 
itself of traces for weeks after use. Skunk is clearly more so, though not 
dangerously addictive or physically debilitating like certain "hard" drugs. 
Like all mind-altering substances it is best avoided by those whose minds 
are likely to be vulnerable to alteration.

I served for over a year on a publicly-funded research committee on the 
future of the 1971 Act. It left me with a number of emphatic conclusions. 
One was that all drugs alter minds, which is why (mostly) weak people take 
them. For some they are beneficial. For many they are harmless.

For a few they can be dangerous.

I would strongly discourage young people from touching drugs, as I would 
discourage them from many ill-advised activities. I would certainly like 
public policy to limit their prevalence.

The 1971 Act does the opposite.

It makes drugs cheap, plentiful and easy to sell to young people.

It is not an act but a social crime.

Making drug use illegal, and thus plunging young people into a world of 
high-pressure criminal salesmanship, is madness.

The 1971 Act is lethal and should be abolished. Cannabis should go where 
nicotine, alcohol, retail drugs, off-course betting, gambling and 
prostitution have gone before, into the realm of regulation and control.

If criminalisation could rid society of this evil, it would have done so 
long ago. Clearly the reverse has happened.

The criminalisation of drugs has been the biggest social catastrophe of the 
past quarter century, wrecking tens of thousands of lives, families, 
communities and businesses. A new framework of control, taxation and 
licensed distribution must be established.

Mr Clarke has no intention of doing this. He has an election on his hands. 
So he suddenly discovers skunk, suddenly reads medical literature, suddenly 
forgets he was in the Government which reclassified cannabis a year ago and 
suddenly orders his Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to "review" its 
classification. Election time is here again. 
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